The Flock (2007)

Erroll Babbage (Richard Gere) works at the Department of Public Safety tirelessly rigorously checking on sex offenders. He is close to retirement and forced to train his young replacement Allison Lowry (Claire Danes). She tries to be sympathetic to Viola Frye (KaDee Strickland) who spins a sob story whereas Erroll takes justice into his own hands. Then 17 years old Harriet Wells turns up missing, and Erroll is given a clue. The cops and everybody else dismisses his suspicion that it's one of his charge.Richard Gere plays a great obsessive dark personality. Claire Danes is a great foil as the slight naive newbie. Together this duo has great chemistry. Hong Kong director Wai-Keung Lau doesn't have quite the dark style for this subject matter. It would have been great with a darker director like David Fincher. The movie doesn't have the needed thrills or tension.

I finally caught "The Flock" on HBO. A taping at 4:20 am while I was asleep, true, but it's better watched at that hour, methinks. It was apparently only released to theaters in Japan and Turkey, from all reports, but North Americans really didn't miss much.It's professionally produced, pairs Claire Danes memorably with Richard Gere, and makes their interplay (standard retiring-burnout-and-protégé) entirely believable in most ways.The gore and corpses aren't beyond those in many modern horror movies, though the camera often lingers more than it should. The fetishes (and worse) of Gere's monitored ex-cons shouldn't shock anyone who's ever been in a triple-X shop.Danes's acting is superb, especially in pursuing an abductor's trail (standard police-procedural, though by non-cops) with Gere's brooding and effective Errol. What blew a hole in this, though, is that she was miscast in the first place.Even though one of Gere's well-worn "flock" is female, nearly all are intimidating men, and the role her character Allison is training to take up calls for more heft. Both physically and professionally.I didn't believe for one minute that Allison chose such a grueling job out of anything more than economic need, certainly not from any more personal calling. No hints are made as to her motivation, nor is anything mentioned of her personal life, beyond nosy behavior and a clumsy allusion by compulsive background-checker Errol.It's a miscasting on a par with what was done with Danes in "The Mod Squad," but unlike that idiocy of a plot-mangled remake, this gives Danes a quite strong setup — and much gore and many sad fetishes — to play against. If you accept that someone of her perception and refinement would ever take that job in the first place, that is.Turn to it on cable, but I wouldn't take the effort to even go to the video store or put it in a Netflix queue. It's worth one viewing.(Most of this review originally appeared on the IMDb board for Claire Danes, followed by considerable discussion.)

The Flock starts as Department of Public Safety official Erroll Babbage (Richard Gere) has just eighteen days left until he retires, Erroll's job is to keep track of paroled sex offenders & rapists who he calls his 'flock'. Erroll is introduced to Allison Lowry (Claire Danes) his replacement, it's up to Errol to show Allison in eighteen days what has taken him eighteen years to learn. While scanning the local newspapers Erroll spots that a seventeen year old girl named Harriet Wells (Kristina Sisco) has been abducted, for somewhat random reasons Erroll suspects that one of his 'flock' may be responsible for the abduction & uses his last eighteen days to try & save the life of Harriet before she ends up just another victim...Produced & directed by Wai-kenung Lau under the pseudonym Andrew Lau this crappy serial killer thriller had a turbulent production, after filming Lau was fired by the studio & producers who then made their own cut of the film which was released across Europe & was the one I saw & thus will be basing my comments on. Then Niels Mueller was brought in to direct some uncredited re-shoots & an entirely different cut of the film was put together, the European cut is about ten minutes longer & the two are edited differently with scenes appearing in different order & both version lose & gain footage over the other. Anyway, while I can't really comment on the US version I pretty much hated the European cut, the whole film is an absolute mess from start to finish. The plot is awful, I guess the makers were going for an edgy serial killer thriller like Se7en (1995) or The Silence of the Lambs (1991) with a race against time to track down a killer & save a life or two. The character's are awful, I think we are meant to empathise with Erroll but he comes across as a lifeless shell while Allison just doesn't have the grit needed for such a tough job. The investigation aspect of The Flock is strictly routine, the script feels like a cheap throwaway TV cop drama with no real twists or surprises & little to no dramatic impact as there's lots of talking, self pitying & turmoil but the script forgets to deliver anything gripping or engaging & I really did hate The Flock as a film. The European cut runs over 100 minutes which is far to long for such a crap film, we never see the the victim Harriet before the end so we never feel sorry for her & strangely we only ever see her parents once very briefly so the parental loss angle is also wasted. There are so many problems with The Flock it's just not funny, why did that guy set is Dog on Erroll? Why not just kill the guy? Would pointing a loaded gun at your partners head & threatening to kill her really make her trust you & risk her life & career for you? How did that black guy at the end know where Harriet was? A frustrating nothing sort of ending that is neither here nor there just rounds things off badly & left me totally unsatisfied. If you like great cop serial killer crime films then give The Flock a miss.The most startling part of The Flock is the text that begins the film, it says that there are over half a million registered sex offenders in the US & for every thousand offenders there is only one caseworker that monitors them which is sort of scary when you think about it. The violence & gore are minimal, a few people are beaten up, there are some photos of severed limbs & a couple of mouldy dead bodies but nothing else. Another big difference between the two different versions is that the European one has that really awful machine gun editing, fades, white-outs & strange editing while the US one is far more straight forward apparently & tones down the annoying attempts at style. The whole film has a somewhat desaturated look & the there's not much colour here.The IMDb says that The Flock had a budget of about $35,000,000 which amazes me, where did all the money go? Next to nothing happens. Filmed in New Mexico. I can't believe the cast in this, Richard Gere looks lost, Claie Danes is miscast & is just an observer 90% of the time while pop star Avril Lavign hasn't been in a film since this was says it all.The Flock is a terrible serial killer thriller with no twists or surprises & the level of investigation is as basic as they come, a really unsatisfying, annoyingly made mess of a film. I am not sure if the US version is any better but it sure can't be any worse, can it?

A worker responsible for monitoring sex offenders is close to retirement after years in the job; what he has experienced puts him on the brink of insanity, perhaps into the abyss of madness when for his last case he goes in search of a missing teenage girl. That is the central tale of this movie and the lead actor does superbly in his role with an equally impressive performance from the actress playing the rookie he is training to take over his position.However this film is more or less ruined by two things:1. The massively irritating and quirky way the film is directed and presented which dilutes and in effect destroys the first rate acting of the leads and obscures the story considerably. Hence a prime example of how the ego/interference of a director etc spoils an otherwise good show.Furthermore, the other negative,2. As indeed another reviewer noted: the picture appears to be an attempted copy in many respects of X-Files('X files without the X') right down to the similarity to the two "stars" of that show being in effect cloned into this film. Therefore what otherwise might have received a 7 or even an 8 from me is reduced by several grades due to the fatal flaws herein outlined.5/10.